by Cowley, Joy
‘Excuse me, Aunt Delia,’ says Francis. ‘We would like to say goodbye.’
As we drive back to the motel, Bea says more than once that Frank and Chloe had no right to order a taxi for the airport when she had been drinking coffee so that she could drive them herself.
‘It doesn’t matter, Bea.’ I am feeling tired and find it difficult to keep my eyes open. It wasn’t smart to drink a large Scotch on the residue of a hangover.
‘Of course it doesn’t matter to you. He’s not your son.’
‘Bea, let it drop.’
‘It would have been Chloe, for sure. She pretends to defer to him but she rules the roost, you know. Wouldn’t let him come on his own. Oh no. Two days and that’s it. Dad’s barely in the ground and they’re in the air again.’
‘Bea, I’m sure Chloe came because she thought she was doing the right thing. I’d say she had a strong sense of duty.’ I feel Bea stiffen and add quickly, ‘If it’s any consolation, which it isn’t, you’re stuck with me for a couple of days. Are you tired? I feel like something the cat dragged in. Do you mind if I have an early night?’
She sits back, opening and closing her hands on the steering wheel. ‘It was all right, wasn’t it? Nothing went wrong.’
‘It was a good send-off.’
‘As it turned out, most of the organising was done for me. I was worried though, that no one would turn up.’ She looks at me. ‘You know something? I thought he might have been there. Jack Holland.’
‘That’s strange,’ I tell her. ‘So did I. I looked coming out of the church. Then I realised I probably wouldn’t have recognised him. Did he ever get in touch with Dad?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I heard he went back to Australia.’ She moves out in the road to pass a cyclist who is being buffeted by the wild, bright wind. ‘He never did take that job with the aero club.’
‘I know.’
‘And they never talked about him. Not once.’
The cyclist is a young man with tousled hair and a red jacket that is ballooning wide around his body. Beyond him, in the noisy blue sky, I imagine a little yellow plane swept about like a leaf. ‘He could be dead,’ I tell her. ‘I guess we’ll never find out what happened to him.’
She sighs. ‘Life is so untidy,’ she says.
Although it is barely evening, my body clock has totally wound down. I excuse myself and fall into bed, my senses invaded by the crashing wind and the sun that splinters the window. Even so, it is not long before I am asleep and dreaming of her piano. She has given me some sheet music which I must learn but when I open it, I discover that it’s in the form of a comic book. There are two people talking in every frame. In one speech bubble there are the treble notes, in the other, the bass. I am finding this music very difficult. I don’t know the time or the key and my mother is saying, ‘The timing doesn’t matter. It’s a dialogue and the key is communication.’ Slowly, so slowly, I try to pick out the notes but my hands don’t want to interpret this new way of playing. The piano keys are made of newspaper and the music is called the ‘Black and White Rag’.
I wake up.
The room is dark. There is a noise by my bed. It is not the wind. It comes through the wall from the unit next door, the one vacated this morning by Francis and Chloe. From the muffled voices, the grunts and the rhythmic creaking, it is obvious that two people are engaged in sexual activity. I roll over, the pillow round my ears, and try to go back to sleep but the noise continues with undiminished energy. Then I hear one voice louder than the other, and I sit up, all sleep gone.
It is almost half after ten and although the light is on in the lounge, the room is empty. Bea’s bed has not been turned down, nor is she in the bathroom. I go back to my room, get into bed and face the wall which seems not to be amplifying the creaks and grunts and occasional shrieks. As a voice rises in an oh, oh, oh, oh, I bang on the wallpaper with my fist and yell, ‘Quiet!’
There is a sudden and dramatic silence.
As Bea suggested earlier, life can be rather untidy.
8
Bea
The wind has disappeared, not a breath to stir the morning. Funny that. It came up roaring an hour before the funeral and went down right after. Erueti says it’s a Maori tradition for the sky to weep for a great man or woman. He doesn’t say anything about wind.
She doesn’t mention last night and neither do I but I can still feel the glow on my hand where he kissed me when I handed him the keys this morning. Not on the back of the hand like a finger-nibbling Frenchman, but a long kiss in the cup of the palm with his nose at my wrist and his breath bathing my entire hand. That was the first thing I thought. Breath. The day I checked in and saw his perfect ears, small, whorled like the inside of a seashell, I wanted to breathe into them. Silly really. But perfect ears are as rare.
‘Do you think they’ll be suitable?’ Diddy says. She is talking about her footwear.
‘You know the farm, Diddy. You know your shoes. Erueti did offer the horses.’
‘For crying out loud, Bea, I haven’t been on a horse in forty years. I’m too bony. My coccyx would fuse to the animal and we’d become a centaur.’
‘He’s got a four-wheeled motorbike he’d lend us.’
‘After hearing how Dad rolled the tractor on that slope? No thanks. I’ll walk.’
We pause at the intersection, indicators flick, flick, flick, and I think of last night and the softness at the back of his neck in contrast to the skin of his chin hardened by shaving. It’s always so lovely in a man, this combination of softness and hardness. And the surprise of hair. Sometimes on the shoulderblades or abdomen. Hair thick as a hearth rug. Or a few silk threads. Covering a map where fingers can walk.
‘Are you listening, Bea?’
‘I’m sorry. I was.’
‘Spare me the details,’ she says.
It’s more than a year since I visited the farm. For Diddy it’s been six years. She’ll see some major changes, but nothing ever stays the same. That’s the way it is. At least she’s in a happy mood. The last two days she’s been as jittery as an addict doing cold turkey, ping, ping, nerves sounding off like banjo wires. Relaxed now, must have slept well. Knowing her, she won’t talk about what happened. Well, if she thinks she spoiled. It was funny. We laughed and laughed and he pulled my head down to rest on his shoulder. Even his arms were soft against me. I like that in a lover, a bit of plumpness. Some women make a fuss of muscle and bone but heck, if I wanted that I’d hug a kitchen chair.
‘Tell me the names of the Rawiri children,’ she says.
‘I told you yesterday.’
‘I’ve forgotten.’
‘It doesn’t matter because they won’t be home. The girls are Riperata and Kiriana. The boy is Ed who is married to Ruth and they have a boy and a girl, Ranui and Tania. Ed is short for Eduardo. He was named after his Italian great-grandfather.
‘Eduardo is a Spanish name,’ she says.
‘It’s Italian. It means Edward, just like Erueti means Edward in Maori. His mother told me that when he was a baby. He was named for her father who died in Trieste during the war.’
‘Be that as it may,’ says Diddy. ‘Eduardo is a Spanish name.’
‘Well, it’s probably both.’
‘The languages are similar but not identical,’ says Diddy. ‘It would be something different in Italian.’
I glance at her. She has got that look in her eye. ‘Oh come on, Diddy. You know enough Italian to order a pizza.’
‘I do have conversational Spanish,’ she says.
‘Since when?’
She folds her arms across her seatbelt. ‘Eduardo is Spanish.’
‘Who cares?’ I slap my hands on the wheel. ‘Do you realise how ridiculous this conversation is?’
‘You’re right,’ she says. ‘You’re absolutely right.’ She unwraps her arms and rests her elbow on the door, drums her fingers on the dashboard. ‘Tell me something. Why did you go into the unit next door?’
&nbs
p; ‘It was empty,’ I reply. To our left there is a tractor and trailer in an orchard, a man in a mask spraying apple trees. I’m surprised that he’s working on a Sunday. Then I realise he couldn’t have done the job in yesterday’s wind. ‘It had a double bed,’ I tell her.
‘Two good reasons,’ she says. ‘Was it worth it?’
‘Yes. Yes it was.’
‘Three good reasons. All right, what shall we talk about?’
On either side of the road, as far as we can see, there are apple orchards. They are all recent history. When we were young, this was poorly drained land hosting buttercups and rushes and dairy cows that wandered across the road. The cows, not the buttercups, of course. One of the Logans died when his car hit a cow. They said it went through the windscreen but I had trouble with that, a fully grown cow going through. I mean, how could it? The Logans have moved away, and the Pojurskis. The Heinkels’ farm is a vineyard. Grapes do well on the river flat. Erueti is thinking of putting the front paddocks into vines. The soil’s right, he said, and it lies to the sun. He told me he will label a private bin collection especially for the Kiwiana restaurant and although he was laughing, I expect that will happen. Erueti never makes throwaway statements.
‘Tell me about your new house,’ says Diddy.
‘You’ll see it tonight. No. Let’s talk about you.’
She seems surprised. ‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, Diddy. You give information like blood. Like I’m a leech or something.’
‘Come on, Bea!’
‘It’s true. I’m not looking for an argument, just stating fact. You mention names and places but they don’t mean anything to me. You seem to think that already I know. Well, I don’t. I don’t know Lal. I don’t know your work or the people. I don’t know anything!’
‘You would if you flipping came over,’ she says.
‘You never invited me.’
‘What?’
‘You never did,’ I tell her.
‘You’re my sister, for God’s sake! Of course I don’t extend a formal invitation. I expect you to say you’re coming and get on a plane. What were you waiting for? Me to mail you a ticket?’
I don’t know why she is suddenly shouting and waving her hands. I raise my voice over hers. ‘Tell me about your work, for heaven’s sake!’
We have slowed behind a freight truck which is moving a crate of black-and-white cows with fat dirty rumps. Their smell fills the car, even with the windows closed and I am reminded of running barefooted in long green grass and treading in a cow pat, the crust breaking and the green soup oozing between my toes with a rich, sun-warm smell.
‘It’s not my work capital M,’ she says. ‘We have a team of nine and each has an area of expertise. Each is responsible for the subcontractors in that area. Antwan DeLevre runs the painting and papering team. They work hard. You know one person will paint forty doors and door frames in a day? That’s right, forty. But Antwan is a funny guy. He’ll never hire anyone he doesn’t know. By know, I mean he’s got this insatiable appetite for inside information, kids’ birthdays, age of grandmother, list of surgeries. He buys cards for anniversaries, you know. I think it’s a form of possessiveness. We call him Big Daddy. Then there’s Aaron and Sylvie Goodman.’
I pull out to pass the cow truck. ‘Is that the man in the beanie?’
‘Yarmulka. That’s Aaron. He’s the joker in the team and an artist extraordinaire. It’s Aaron and Sylvie who have built my reputation. No, I mean it. I still do most of the stencils and gold leaf work but I leave the real art to them.’
‘They paint pictures for you?’
‘On walls and ceilings. Let me tell you. They’ll cover a wall with a pre-Raphaelite rose garden or they’ll do a kind of Marc Chagall tree growing up from the floor and branching all over the ceiling with flowers and violins and goblets of wine. They interview the client, then they do the sketches. They work together. They argue. They never stop arguing. But that’s just their mouths. The rest is in perfect harmony. They can –’ She turns her head. ‘Grape vines! What happened to Heinkels’ farm?’
‘Vineyards all over. There’s not much money in sheep, these days. Go on.’
‘Aaron’s the joker. He tells stories, teases. Always when he does a painting, there is some little joke. It’s his signature. In a rose garden there’ll be a small bird with three legs. A Paris street scene will have a distant road sign in Hebrew. He’s famous for it. The clients always look for the Aaron Goodman trademark. But there was a time when he didn’t do it. It was a three-bedroomed apartment on upper Park Ave and the clients wanted to turn one of the bedrooms into a chapel. They wanted a copy of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam on the ceiling. I’ve never seen Aaron so uncomfortable with a painting. He’s not fanatical but for one thing, he had a real problem about putting a human image on God. Then there was the appearance of Adam. If he could have passed the job onto someone else, he would have been happy. He did it, though. Sylvie took me in to check the work before the scaffolding came down. It was a great painting, straight off the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But, you know, we scanned every inch of it and we couldn’t see Aaron’s trademark. No joke. He couldn’t bring himself to sign the work. I said it was a pity. Sylvie said it sure was a pity with bells on. Then she mixed a palette of paint and skimmed up the ladder. You know what she did? She circumcised Adam.’ Diddy winds down her window. ‘More grapes. Bea, what’s happened to the place?’
I have told her several times that she must expect some changes to the farm but she is still surprised by the vines next door, the new bridge, the carved figures at our old gateway.
‘Heads on poles!’ she exclaims.
‘They’re po. Erueti’s Maori ancestors.’
‘Yeah? But he didn’t go in for that stuff.’
We drive slowly between the tall poles with their sightless faces painted the colour of ferric oxide. They are a symbol of a greater change which she has missed. All over the country. Maori identity and Anglo bewilderment.
‘That family didn’t even speak Maori,’ she says.
I change gear and we bump over the drive, ruts hardened by dry weather. ‘Erueti speaks Maori, Italian, English, French and a bit of Samoan. He says that Maori is his first language. He and Donna speak it. All the time in the house with the family.’
‘That’s certainly new,’ Diddy says.
Not so new. Diddy has lived away from this country for so long that the slow movements of change must seem as sudden as earthquakes. ‘They’re going to put the front paddocks in vines,’ I say, changing the subject.
The truth is, we tell ourselves lies. Everywhere I go I applaud the Maoritanga movement, the gathering pride of local tribes, the way they claim. Yes, I do. Their land and their language. I do approve in principle. But not my Erueti. I saw him first the day after his birth. I wheeled him in his pram, taught him to say my name. I made him a sailor doll out of a clothes-peg, showed him how to blow bubbles with an acorn and grass-straw pipe, took him to his class on my way to high school. Years later by the river, I didn’t seduce him. It wasn’t like that. He was fifteen with a deep voice and sleepy eyes filled with loving, and he splashed me. Water in my face, laughing. At his wedding, he said with his arm around Donna that a man never forgets his first love and for the quickest time, he looked at me. That’s when I was living with Peter. No. Wait a minute. I think it was Angus. Anyway, I knew Erueti more fully than I had known any other man and then. It was all different. Not that the Erueti I knew changed. It was this other side of him that I didn’t know existed. The Maoriness. Talking to his children and Donna with words I didn’t understand. Stopping me when I tried to set the table with an old cotton bedsheet instead of a tablecloth. And this ancestor business, names linked to other families all over the country. I wasn’t a part of. He still rode a horse bareback. He still had lovely sleepy eyes. But he was moving more and more into that other world and closing the door between him and me. I hated him for it.
Diddy says, ‘
Did Dad know Erueti was going into wine?’
‘No. He was past knowing anything.’
‘Dad and his precious sheep.’ She laughs. ‘He always thought that synthetic fibres were just a passing fad.’
The garage has been repainted. Where there were once roses, sunflowers and lavender there is now concrete, a shed with three bicycles in it and a basketball hoop outside. Wooden tubs grow green herbs in Dad’s old smoking place in the back porch. There is a line of shoes, all sizes and colours, by the screen door.
Donna comes out to welcome us. She wears a faded T-shirt which shouts the words Don’t be happy. Worry! but the message hasn’t got to her face yet and her smile is as wide as the door. As we kick off our shoes, she looks at Diddy’s moccasins. ‘I think Riparata’s got a new pair of trainers about your size. You got time for a cup of tea and some muffins?’
Diddy’s eyes are sliding around the walls, touching on the photographs and furniture, the woven tukutuku panel in the hall, the collection of flax baskets, some decorated with bits of wood and paua shell. In the kitchen there is a large poster which seems to be advertising some Maori cultural event but the information is all in Maori so I’m not sure what. Things change. Our table was always by that wall and there’s a TV and stereo cabinet where the piano used to be.
Erueti’s in the laundry putting a new cold tap over the tub. Here, everything is the same, the washing machine Dad bought Mum with his tax rebate, the yellow and black floor tiles where we used to throw our dirty clothes expecting her to pick them up and somehow magic them into our wardrobe, clean and neatly ironed. Why didn’t she make us wash our own clothes? She worked so hard and we took it all for granted. No wonder she needed that piano.
